There are two main factors that directly influence in how well your website converts: its usability and its design.  How user-friendly your website is impacts directly the way in which users behave, and the site engagement which has a great effect on conversions. On the other side, the website design despite what many might think also has a great impact on conversion for two main reasons: it affects the trust that users develop towards your company, and makes easier for users to follow the customer’s path. In the following lines you will be able to understand better what I am talking about.

Here you have a few tips that will surely increase your chances of generating leads through your website:

-          Have a clean, uncluttered design

This might seem a very obvious point, but there is still a great amount of websites out there that display big chunks of information and links altogether making it difficult for users to web through the site and understand the content. Although it is considered one of the most user-friendly ecommerce websites, Amazon is also quite cluttered and users tend to complain about it, which in the end might be affecting their conversions. Here you have a picture of the site.

You might think that Amazon is not a good example, because they sell a lot. That is completely true, Amazon is the biggest ecommerce shop in the world, and the reason why is considered so user friendly is because the navigation throughout the site is pretty smooth and things that make a difference like the search, the recommended products widgets and the checkout process are above the average. But that doesn’t mean that with a neater web design, the conversion rate couldn’t be higher.

-          Follow the standard:

By following the standards I don’t intend to say that your website has to look similar to the rest, in fact, you should try to make your website look a different and capture the attention of the user, you should still respect some implicitly agreed conventions that every web designer has with the visitors. Basically try to keep the same structure, having the menu on the top left of the website, login buttons on the top right, and in definitive don’t change the way that users navigate through the site, because although it might look nice, people are likely to get lost, or have problems navigating your site.

-          Take into consideration how people read websites

One of the most important rules to improve conversions in websites is understanding how users read the website, and that is called the Gutemberg Rule.

As you can see anything on the top part as well as the left bottom part with less intensity is a valuable area to place call to actions and important information. Never place those important things on the called “Terminal Area” as they are likely to be ignored unless they are very prominent.

In case we are talking about an Arabic country, take into consideration that websites are in the inverse way, from right to left.

-          Guide your customers to conversion

Many website designs have the problem of not being able to drag the users attention to the point of conversion. That usually happens when either the website is very cluttered and the attention of the user is very disperse around the screen or when there are important bits of information spread around the whole screen.

To make sure that you guide your users in their path to conversion, you should design the site in a way that incites them to follow a certain order. Here you have a very good example:

As you see the whole website guides the user all the way down to the conversion button.

-          Don’t Stop Testing!

Although there are some general rules that tend to be true, every website is different, and every audience is different. Therefore try what works best for you and what doesn’t. You can try different colours, page structures and even menus and compare the results obtained with Google Analytics. There is a new feature called experiments that allow you among some other interesting features to give two different landing pages, and show half of them to a group of users and half of them to another and see which one converts better.

I hope you find these tips useful and take them into consideration when you talk to your web design agency. Keep tuned!